Social Information (reply to Capurro)

Rafael--

I agree these are very "tricky formulations for designing very different
things." It was ian attempt, admiteddly bound to fail, to capture these
differences that I used all three terms. I had spent some time asking
Anglo-American philosophers if there were a difference between "ethics" and
"morals" and was told Morals relates to sex and Ethics relates to the rest.
That disappointed me so totally I decided to make up my own meanings. The
result is not exactly what you said.

However, Aristotle's use of the root word "ethos" suggests that customs and
mores was at work in his formulation. Also, I wanted to get at some of
what Durkheim said about religion. Finally, there is a nice academic
cottage industry in America (see MacIntyre, e.g.) which describes ethics as
the form of knowledge for determing what is moral. The older tradition
which ranks Morals as primary and Ethics as legalistic and secondary was
less appealing to me.

Anyway, I would make the following distinctions:
"morals" = the symbolic representation of end-states;
"ethics" = the rules for achieving these end-states; and
"values" = the relative positive or negative weightings attached to
end-states. (The latter comes close to the Homeric notion of dividing
spoils properly, which was also in Aristotle's mind.)

Morals sanction organizational structures; ethics teach people how to act
so those sanctioned structures can be reached; and values are the emotional
triggers motivating action. So, if people "know" where they ought to be,
have a sense of how to get there, and are excited about the prospects, then
my supposition is they will be inclined to pick certain behavioral options
rather than others and a social system will endure.

What I was, in any case, trying to get at is the totality of elements that
must be involved to influence human choices and actions in ways that could
account for the otherwise miraculous fact that societies endure over time.
I thought there was more to it than any one of those terms in isolation
would imply, so I put them all together.

Of course, any thing like a social system will replicate because of what
the information stored in it MEANS, which is why I also tried to link the
problem of social information to an environmental context. Thus, some
moral statement like "Thou shalt not ..." generally speaking does not
actually prohibit the behavior it specifies, for there are rules for
defining the .... which apply in various ways in multiple situations with
diverse results. This makes for problems, of course, but it also is what
makes social systems, unlike crystals, dynamic, evolving, self-trasnforming
systems.

I am wondering if something like a value-free definition of value, which is
part of what I am after, implies our societies have relaxed their
constraints to the point where evolution is virtually continuoius, because
individuals are always able to fluctuate social structures by choosing
something unexpected or new. Are we at "the edge of chaos" and, if so, can
we handle the stress?

Once again, Rafael, your contributions to these discussions prove really
valuable. Thanks for taking the time.

Bob Artigiani
Received on Tue Sep 29 08:51:30 1998